Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

“The tech review world has been full of murky deals between companies and influencers for years, but it appears Google finally crossed a line with the Pixel 9. The company’s invite-only Team Pixel program — which seeds Pixel products to influencers before public availability — stipulated that participating influencers were not allowed to feature Pixel products alongside competitors, and those who showed a preference for competing phones risked being kicked out of the program.”

Something to keep in mind when you see people gushing about the Pixel 9.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/16/24221755/google-team-pixel-reviews-influencers

colonizers in the "past": spread deadly disease with no regard for other people

me looking at the people without masks: so, youre not trying to break that cycle huh

There's a bunch of uncertainty around whether the quotation came from Margaret Mead but someone said it, in any case: a healed femur is the earliest sign of true civilization in the fossil record.

For someone to be loved, protected and cared for so completely that they survived a break which left them completely dependent on others for every basic need while it healed? That's the whole point of being an "us."

anyway i think the right to repair people should talk to people in the fired arts about our kilns. i think we spend so much time with technology that's intentionally disposable that we have forgotten what it's like to use an incredibly powerful machine that you can fix yourself after watching a youtube video

i didn't realize how much that lack of control was wearing on me until i had something break that i could actually fix. without a subversion of the technology even! it's supposed to be like this!

I don't hate the rich because I'm jealous and wish I had that kind of money

I legitimately don't

I hate the rich because no one should ever have that kind of power

And they should feel that hatred from everyone

I wonder if, instead of 'cordcutters’, we’ll get a whole generation of 'subcutters’, as people move on from subscriptions to streaming services and the like.

And not even because of the cost, although that will certainly play a role for many, but because the big streamers just had to go and ‘optimise’ for a model (everything they own only on their own service) that they are already abandoning again, ruining their service in the process.

There are so many options they could have tried, and instead we're back at locked-in content blanketed with ads and dark patterns, fuelled by opaque algorithms.

All because they got greedy.

I don't think they understand that paying yearly for a service is starting to look like a really bad idea, even with the recurring price hikes. There's no reward for loyalty, and the thing you are paying for now may very well not exist in its current form six months from now, let alone twelve.

It's becoming much more attractive to just pay for a month or two, catch up on everything you want to watch, and then unsubscribe again.

Which, by the way, in case this is not obvious to the execs in charge, is cheaper than paying for a yearly sub.

It's just ... kind of sad? So much potential, and yet they're all just aping each other 😕